- Universe had a Beginning - for thousands of years, the dominant world view among many of the greatest philosophers and scientists was that we lived in a steady-state universe with no beginning and no end. This view was maintained at all cost until in 1965 (Big Bang discovery), they ran out of excuses and reluctantly conceded to what the Torah has been saying all along - that our universe had a beginning. see here for more details.
- Origin of Life - despite all the hype about Darwinian evolution, the reality is that we cannot point to a single case anywhere of some new organ or new limb arising through unguided, natural processes. For example tracing some creature in the past few hundred or thousand years which we observed without such and such a gland or organ (sensory or otherwise), and now it has "evolved" this organ or some insect with only legs and arms and now it has a new pincer claw. Nor can we even point to a mere duplicated structure, such as some insect species which had 2 eyes or 2 antennas and now it has duplicated an extra eye or an extra antenna and this was advantageous and spread into the population. Of all the millions of species out there, not a single such case has ever been observed (and even for the minor changes observed, there is mounting evidence that most are not at all random, but rather the organism itself senses what it needs and changes itself accordingly[2]). According to the Torah's account, there was an era called the "6 days" of creation where G-d created nature, guided it and shaped it, until it was complete with man. After this incubation period, the laws of nature were left in their present form. This would explain why no new limbs, antennas, etc. have ever been observed. For, (of course) that would require intelligent guidance, and the current state of nature just cannot do the job on its own. see here for more.
This would also explain why the basic cellular unit underlying all known life on Earth has been found to be enormously complex, far more complex than anything mankind has ever confronted. This has led top thinkers including Nobel prize winners to increasingly turn away from the popular evolutionary biology consensus and to say that scientists have absolutely no idea what caused life on Earth to originate [5].
Free Will - the Torah teaches us the world was built around the concept of free will. We find nature permeated with paradoxes. Some examples:
* On the one hand every person in his right mind knows that chance can only produce random nonsense. On the other hand, we find DNA similarities between creatures leaving an opening for random evolution.
* On the one hand, vast bottomless wisdom in everything, even the simplest bacteria or even a mere electron or proton can be studied endlessly by all of humanity combined. On the other hand, we can't see any intelligence anywhere.
* The universe shows evidence of the Big Bang, yet at the same time everything uniform as if in steady state (cosmic background radiation, laws of physics same everywhere, Horizon problem, Axis of Evil). Another example, many signs the Earth is young[7].
* All species in the fossil record appear suddenly and fully formed. Likewise when they leave the fossil record (become extinct) they are exactly the same as when they first appeared millions of years before (see here for details). This is incompatible with common ancestry. Yet, DNA similarities point to yes common ancestry.
Likewise, scientists frequently find fossils of "ancient" creatures in the "wrong" strata, i.e. higher up than much later creatures. Dumbfounded paleontologist can only "conclude" that the strata of land must have flipped. This often involved huge areas of land spanning hundreds of square kilometers and with no credible explanation whatsoever how this could have happened[9].
There are many more examples. What is the answer to all these myriad paradoxes? Free will. G-d told us the right answer in the Torah. This is what we are supposed to trust.
(note that G-d is perfectly capable of creating the world looking older than it is, just like a painter can draw a fresh painting of a 90-year old woman. According to our sources, He even recreates the world continuously from nothing, like in a movie screen.)
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Footnotes
- [1] http://audio.ohr.edu/track/id=2006
- [2] http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/evolution-too-slow-for-climate-change/
- [3] http://dafyomireview.com/455
- [4] http://dafyomireview.com/article.php?docid=427&d=8
- [5] http://dafyomireview.com/oligarch1.htm
- [6] http://dafyomireview.com/article.php?docid=427&d=7
- [7] https://answersingenesis.org/evidence-for-creation/six-evidences-of-young-earth/ ignore christian stuff
- [8] http://dafyomireview.com/chovos/evolution.htm#evo_part2_fossil
- [9] see Awake My Glory ch.4 for several sources
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